jails Does a FreeBSD Linux jail *have* to be Debian or CentOS 7? Is it possible to easily use a different distribution?

puppydog

puppydog

There's a certain application that I require that I've never been able to successfully run in a normal FreeBSD jail. I currently run it on a Linux VPS, but since I'd like to get rid of that and move it to my main FreeBSD jail server, I think I'm about ready to give up trying to make it happen in a FreeBSD environment and instead try setting up a Linux jail for it.

I don't especially like Debian, and CentOS 7, while more suitable (I'm much more familiar with RHEL-based distributions), is very near EOL. I would prefer instead to have my jail on either Rocky 9 or Slackware. Unfortunately all the documentation I see just talks about debootstrap and linux-c7.

Is there a way to instead use a different distribution? Ideally without needing to dive in so deep that I'm just building a bespoke new distribution package like linux-c7?
 
Way back in the earlier days we had several you could choose from. They've all been removed because it was a lot of work keeping everything updated. But there's no reason you must use Debian or CentOS. The compatibility layer "emulates" (better: translates) Linux kernel calls. So anything that runs on top of a bog standard Linux kernel could potentially run on it.

For example (these are all gone now):
emulators/linux_base-f10
emulators/linux_base-gentoo-stage1
emulators/linux_base-suse-9.1
And a bunch more.
 
We've created a bunch of Rocky Linux 9 ports at $WORK, but haven't find time to upstream it yet, unfortunately. It allows us to run contemporary Google Chrome binaries for Linux and many more.
 
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